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Mr. LaRose and fans.
Storytime at the Julian Dixon Library, under the expert tutelage of Supt. Dave LaRose, grew up Tuesday evening.
He is tall enough to play for the Lakers.
He is consistently amusing enough to emcee the Oscars.
His busy brain is nimble enough to lead the School District in a scholarly manner while simultaneously entertaining an audience of 3- to 6-year-olds as if he were their sandbox peer.
Storytime is a Tuesday evening tradition at the library.
Surely it reached its pinnacle when the rangy Mr. LaRose, lavishly outfitted in a red-white-black, instantly recognizable Cat in the Hat character from the fabulous Dr. Seuss series, strolled – does a grownup Cat stroll? – into the Multi-Purpose Room.
To his youthful audience, it must have seemed as if his head went all the way up to the soooo tall ceiling.
Apart from the notion that relatively few Cats, except in the Seuss universe, cavort upright, Mr. LaRose bonded immediately with his discerning audience.
Speaking, shhhh, so softly that it was difficult to hear him a few feet away, Mr. LaRose’s rhetoric could not have been observed more attentively by the children if their parents had firmly held them in place.
He deployed so many voices – from falsetto to the basement – that the children must have thought there were other people wandering around in the depths of his spacious uniform.
But here was a critical key – even at the most excitable junctures of “Cat in the Hat,” Mr. LaRose’s 10 different voices never rose loudly enough to be heard more than several people away.
Shining faces turned upward, the boys and girls were so still sitting on the floor that a casual visitor might have thought they were painted in place.
As he has consistently shown since arriving in Culver City seven months ago, he is pitch perfect, whatever his task du jour.
All in Their Family
The evening was a LaRose family affair, his charming wife Mindi, the photographer, roaming the room to make the event an illustration for everyone to remember.
